“So… I lost my second son last week. The first was lost to an avalanche, the second to suicide. Nathaniel had struggled with depression most of his life. He was 33 years old. I’m not posting this because I’m looking for sympathy. I’m actually looking for something else.
I know this might seem strange to someone who has never had to deal with a mentally ill person before, but I have been mourning Nate’s loss for two decades now and I have finished the process. There had been so many suicide attempts, so many bloody traumas, and so many failed efforts to get him help, that I had already resigned myself to this possibility.
At first, his depression was accompanied by rebellion but after all the damage had been done, Nate came to me one day and said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve dug such a deep hole for myself and I don’t know how I can ever recover.’ He was contrite and endearing and we were able to talk about deeper things even though the brooding remained. Then, he met a young woman and got married. A baby was born in early December and they were both very happy. Baby Max looked just like Nate and my son suddenly seemed full of hope.
But the joy lasted only a month. In early January, Max went to sleep and never woke up. When they found the baby, his lips were blue and there was nothing anyone could do. The baby was only 36 days old and Nate fell into his final bout of depression.
So here’s what I really want to say about mental illness…
If a child is born with a hole in her heart, everyone in our society would respond the same way. We would all say, ‘Oh, that’s so sad! Is there something we can do?’ No one would ever wag his head at the child or the parents and say, ‘You must have done something wrong!’ We would all offer sympathy rather than ignorant condemnation. But when a child is born with a chemical imbalance or a genetic predisposition towards mental illness, that child and his/her parents can look forward to a lifetime of shame and blame from a society that is truly clueless about the nature of the problem.
What we need to understand is that the brain is just an organ. It may be the most complicated organ in the body, but it is still just a mass of biological stuff that is susceptible to disease just like a liver or a lung or a pancreas. The fact that our culture offers sympathy to a patient with a damaged heart but wags its collective head at a patient with a damaged brain suggests that we really never left the dark ages when it comes to our understanding of mental illness.